Related papers: A Researcher's Guide to Empirical Risk Minimizatio…
Modern complex datasets often consist of various sub-populations with known group information. In the presence of sub-population heterogeneity, it is crucial to develop robust and generalizable learning methods that (1) can enjoy robust…
Many biochemical applications such as molecular property prediction require models to generalize beyond their training domains (environments). Moreover, natural environments in these tasks are structured, defined by complex descriptors such…
We present a distribution optimization framework that significantly improves confidence bounds for various risk measures compared to previous methods. Our framework encompasses popular risk measures such as the entropic risk measure,…
In performative prediction, the deployment of a predictive model triggers a shift in the data distribution. As these shifts are typically unknown ahead of time, the learner needs to deploy a model to get feedback about the distribution it…
Empirical risk minimization (ERM) is typically designed to perform well on the average loss, which can result in estimators that are sensitive to outliers, generalize poorly, or treat subgroups unfairly. While many methods aim to address…
In this paper, we consider learning scenarios where the learned model is evaluated under an unknown test distribution which potentially differs from the training distribution (i.e. distribution shift). The learner has access to a family of…
We study risk-sensitive reinforcement learning in finite discounted MDPs with recursive entropic risk measures (ERM), where the risk parameter $\beta \neq 0$ controls the agent's risk attitude: $\beta>0$ for risk-averse and $\beta<0$ for…
We consider estimation and control in linear time-varying dynamical systems from the perspective of regret minimization. Unlike most prior work in this area, we focus on the problem of designing causal estimators and controllers which…
In this paper, we study the estimation performance of empirical $\ell_2$ risk minimization (ERM) in noisy (standard) phase retrieval (NPR) given by $y_k = |\alpha_k^*x_0|^2+\eta_k$, or noisy generalized phase retrieval (NGPR) formulated as…
Recently, invariant risk minimization (IRM) was proposed as a promising solution to address out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. However, it is unclear when IRM should be preferred over the widely-employed empirical risk minimization…
This paper studies a recent proposal to use randomized value functions to drive exploration in reinforcement learning. These randomized value functions are generated by injecting random noise into the training data, making the approach…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has traditionally been understood from an episodic perspective; the concept of non-episodic RL, where there is no restart and therefore no reliable recovery, remains elusive. A fundamental question in…
We consider the problem of selecting a subset of points from a dataset of $n$ unlabeled examples for labeling, with the goal of training a multiclass classifier. To address this, we build upon the regret minimization framework introduced by…
Empirical risk minimization (ERM) can be computationally expensive, with standard solvers scaling poorly even in the convex setting. We propose a novel lossless compression framework for convex ERM based on color refinement, extending prior…
We study agents acting in an unknown environment where the agent's goal is to find a robust policy. We consider robust policies as policies that achieve high cumulative rewards for all possible environments. To this end, we consider agents…
Although there exist plentiful theories of empirical risk minimization (ERM) for supervised learning, current theoretical understandings of ERM for a related problem---stochastic convex optimization (SCO), are limited. In this work, we…
Most bandit algorithm designs are purely theoretical. Therefore, they have strong regret guarantees, but also are often too conservative in practice. In this work, we pioneer the idea of algorithm design by minimizing the empirical Bayes…
We study risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) based on the entropic risk measure. Although existing works have established non-asymptotic regret guarantees for this problem, they leave open an exponential gap between the upper and…
Performative prediction is a framework accounting for the shift in the data distribution induced by the prediction of a model deployed in the real world. Ensuring rapid convergence to a stable solution where the data distribution remains…
We study the kernelized bandit problem, that involves designing an adaptive strategy for querying a noisy zeroth-order-oracle to efficiently learn about the optimizer of an unknown function $f$ with a norm bounded by $M<\infty$ in a…